Busting the Fish Myth
By Lucy Goodchild
“And it’s all to play for on this defining night of finball. Here comes Henry with a belter, stopped by Crouch’s long fins… and he’s got the ball… there he goes… GOAL! What a performance, and all thanks to Crouch’s right fin!”That’s right. Fin. Two goldfish, aptly named Thierry Henry and Peter Crouch, have been trained by wildlife film-maker Matt Thompson to play football. And they don’t forget how to do it after three seconds, as the popular myth would have you believe, although they might not be totally au fait with the offside rule.
Researchers insist that fish are no less able to learn and remember than some of their furrier relatives. They’re not blessed with a cerebral cortex – that all important grey matter which enables abstract thought and language - but they certainly do have a central nervous system, which consists of a spinal chord and a brain.According to researcher Culum Brown, who edited the September issue of Fish and Fisheries in 2003, “Fish are more intelligent than they appear.” In ’Learning in fishes: from three-second memory to culture’, he and his colleagues, Kevin Laland and Jens Krause claim there has been a “sea change” in conceptions. “Gone is the image of fish as drudging and dim-witted pea-brains.” The issue cites more than 500 papers that refute the three-second memory myth.
Maybe they’re just good at ball games
Fish can be taught to do all sorts of things, not just how to play football. Siamese fighting fish can remember the location of food in a maze; there are studies that show fish can locate food using landmarks and remember the location of hidden scraps. And they can be conditioned to associate the noise of a bell with receiving food, like Pavlov’s dogs. Some experts even believe fish exhibit basic
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The a-maze-ing Siamese
fighting fish. |
But fish often don’t have time for such petty games. They have, well, bigger fish to fry. One of a fish’s basic skills is the ability to avoid and escape danger, and they have quite a knack for it. Australian Crimson spotted rainbow fish have been shown to learn to escape from a net and are able to remember how to do so for up to eleven months - the equivalent of 40 years in “human time”. Fish also remember the location of rock pools in which to seek refuge.
Intelligent life in the deep
There’s a lot more fish should be given credit for, says Laland. “Steeped in social intelligence, pursuing Machiavellian strategies of ‘manipulation, punishment and reconciliation’; exhibiting stable ‘cultural’ traditions; and co-operating with each other…”; fish are arguably more civilised than some of us. They use tools, build their own homes and can not only recognise their shoal mates but also judge their position on the social ladder, which certainly provides an excuse for purchasing a castle for your home aquarium.
Okay. So fish rely on long-term memory. They use sight, sound and smell to reach goals - usually foody ones - and can even figure out shortcuts. All this, say researchers, makes fish great models for studying learning and memory in vertebrates and puts them on par in this sense with some non-human primates. But Victoria Braithwaite, an evolutionary biology expert, goes a step further. She says fish have lateralised brains, like dogs. “Life experiences can affect which side of the brain fish use.”
To test this, Braithwaite raised the young of wild fish in the laboratory and compared their brain functions. The lab-raised fish, that had been living stressless, predator-free lives, processed novel objects using the left side of the brain, indicating that they were comfortably curious. The wild parents, however, looked at new things with a suspicious left eye, because they had been raised in an environment full of danger. This, says Braithwaite, shows that fish have feelings. This is perhaps the reason she avoids fishfinger sarnies.Fancy something else a bit fishy?
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- Eeny Weeny - Little squirt's big potential
- Icky Dicky - Candirú: the willy fish
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